


Jack's War

by akraia



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: World War I, and yet here it is, pretty sure nobody asked for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 08:11:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13899930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akraia/pseuds/akraia
Summary: It is the Gallipoli campaign at the latest when Jack is finally and decisively divested of any romantic notions of being a soldier he may have privately entertained.





	Jack's War

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write something completely different, but somehow this ended up as a thing about Jack's experience of World War I. My research of the Australian army in WWI is pretty patchy, so any improbabilities/mistakes are entirely mine. If anyone is interested, I've assumed that Jack served in the 23rd Australian Infantry Battalion.

Jack and Rosie are married not quite two years when war breaks out, permanently shifting their world and that of everyone they know. Jack joins up in early 1915, having been held back by disinclination to leave Rosie and the hope that the war will be over by Christmas, like everyone keeps saying. But Christmas has come and gone, and there is no hope in sight that this madness is going to end anytime soon. So Jack joins one of the countless infantry battalions being raised in the Australian Imperial Force. He is young and healthy and his desire to stay with his new wife and not be killed on some foreign battlefield is no match for the sense that serving his country is the good, right, proper thing to do.

It is the Gallipoli campaign at the latest when Jack is finally and decisively divested of any romantic notions of being a soldier he may have privately entertained. Unrelenting gunfire, deafening shelling, constant fear, dirt, sickness and death will do that to a man. Jack hasn't led a particularly sheltered existence for the first 27 years of his life, but nothing has prepared him for the sheer, visceral horror of war. When he gets a spare moment to think, which is rare enough, he ponders the paradox that every day is as horrific as the one before, and yet his mind seems to have numbed enough to bear it. Jack feels a lot of things – fiercely determined, scared out of his wits and weary to the bone by turns – but never numb, which he would in all honesty prefer.

After Gallipoli, what is left of Jack's battalion is strengthened up with a few weeks of rest and a supply of new recruits, then dispatched to France. With every day that passes, Jack loses a little more of the sense that there used to be a reality before all of this. A brave – some might say foolish – action that earns him the promotion to lance corporal, a piece of shrapnel that nicks his leg and a bout of trench fever are just short disruptions in the routine of tenuous gains and devastating losses in the trenches.

He does remember what it was like, of course, to play in the street with his brother and sister when they were children, to hold his mother's hand in the moment life slipped from her body, to wake up to Rosie sitting on the bed in her dressing gown, drinking tea and reading a magazine. These are the memories he keeps carefully stowed away in his head, to be looked at when he is in particular need of encouragement. But after a while they begin to pale in comparison to this new world of dirt and blood and destruction he now inhabits.

Somehow, the war ends, and somehow – and to the day of his death Jack won't be sure how he managed it – he comes home to Melbourne in one piece. He comes back to Rosie and their house, his family and his job, but nothing feels as it did, or as it should. The irony that he is alive and finally home, though certainly older and more hardened than he was, and now feels the numbness he has craved for so long, is not lost on him.

Rosie is overjoyed to have him home and safe again. She does her best to give him time and to understand what he has been through, but some things aren't possible to be understood by anyone who hasn't lived through them. And Jack's wife, for the many qualities she possesses, is easily frustrated by things she doesn't understand.

_I look at you, and I don't recognise the man I married._

It seems self-indulgent to mourn the part of his personality that has died somewhere along the way when so many men have died or lost far more than Jack has, so he doesn't. He goes back to work with enthusiasm bordering on doggedness, does his best to patch up his marriage, finds new books to read and new things to be interested in. He does his best to go on living as if the war hadn't happened. For a while, it almost feels like he is succeeding.

 


End file.
